Community Update - 2017 Year in Review

jordanjay29

Hello fellow Flarumites!

It's been a while since we did one of these, and one of my new year's resolutions is to be more diligent about making sure the community stays updated on a regular basis. This coincides with some other promises to be more regular (and not the way your grandfather hopes to be), so it's safe to say Flarum has a few strings tied around its fingers.

Development

In 2017, Flarum kept on pace towards 0.1 stable, though at a slower rate than we saw in 2016. Nevertheless, important milestones were met and work continues as Flarum begins to focus more on stability and features in the backend than user-facing features.

Flarum's core devs, @Toby and @Franz worked hard to come up with a New Roadmap for Flarum that lays out a plan for Flarum towards the 0.1 stable release and beyond. This plan allows our devs to coordinate a little better on development and some observant folks have noticed the pace of GitHub commits has become significantly better than 2016.

The long-awaited beta 7 released in 2017. It wasn't a momentous or exciting release, but a step on the way towards 0.1 stable that Flarum desperately needs. With it came one of the first significant changes to Flarum's requirements, the lack of support for PHP 5.5 branch, and some better user controls. The more important part is that it laid the groundwork for future beta and stable versions with updated libraries.

Project

Since Flarum's inception, we've primarily reached our community here on this forum, and on Gitter chat. Gitter was originally an open source project that was later acquired by GitLab. However, its features lagged compared to other chat solutions, so Flarum decided to move to the popular Discord platform.

At the same time, Flarum released a much-requested platform for coordinated donations, a Patreon. Patreon was, like Discord, chosen for its popularity and instant familiarity with many of Flarum's userbase, and ability to accept multiple payment types. As a reward, many of our Patrons have access to a special chatroom where they get special insights into Flarum's development, and the ability to give our core devs the financial means to work on Flarum. Click here to become a patron!

A special thanks to @adilwali as our first $20 patron. You're making history with Flarum!

Staff Changes

As you know, Toby is full-time medical student, part-time Flarum core developer, and full-time awesome guy for juggling all of that. He's had success this year in his medical studies, and is moving confidently towards his graduation in 2018. On top of that, he's put aside some more time for Flarum this year and development in the latter half of 2017 moved at a steady pace.

@Franz has taken on some new duties as a merge master, and is in charge of reviewing and approving pull requests to Flarum's code. This has helped to streamline the process and work through the backlog of PRs that were outstanding.

Our core development team grew in 2017 with the addition of @luceos to its ranks. He's been working hard on updating our Laravel components from 5.1 to 5.5, as well as creating useful extensions with the Flagrow development team on the side.

On the community moderator side, we saw some changes as well. We briefly welcomed @webeindustry to the ranks of moderator, but he later stepped down. Late last year, we added @Liberty and @Pollux as well, and they've been working hard to keep things well-oiled. Unfortunately, we said goodbye to @Kulga as a mod in 2017 as well. His contributions on this site and at devflarum will not be forgotten.

In addition to our community moderators and core devs, we now have a documentation team with the addition of @Arkinn in 2017. He updated and expanded the current documentation into something that is easier to use and maintain for the future. You'll see the new docs up on the website in the future.

Community Contributions

Where would we be in 2018 without our community? I'll answer for you, Flarum would be dust. It's our active community that keeps this project moving, both by motivating our core developers, by creating extensions, by showing off themes and utilities, and by creating services that others can use to build their Flarum sites. 2017 was a huge year for Flarum's community in terms of contributions, and we can talk about some of the more tangible ones here.

Like in 2016, 2017 saw more extension developers join Flarum and build cool features you might have requested, or never thought about. Our developers published 49 new extensions (that's 9 more than in 2016!), 12 new languages and a handful of themes and other utilities. It would take too long to list them out, so you can click those links and browse for yourself, there are some notable new inclusions in 2017.

Honestly, I'd argue that Flarum has reached feature parity with other popular platforms out there, but I'm pretty biased. Nevertheless, Flarum has become a broad platform with extensions that should fulfill many needs, with plenty of room to grow.

Reflections on 2017

Last year was a time of review and strategy for Flarum, with less visible progress than in the past. That didn't stop us from continuing to grow, to release new versions and stay in touch with our community. We faltered some on development speed and the lack of community updates, but the release of our new roadmap helped put our development on track, and switching to Discord helped us be more engaged with our community. In addition, the Patreon has helped alleviate some of the financial burdens on Toby, who gave his own reflection on 2017 here. Our staff stayed busy with Flarum and in their real lives, and for an all-volunteer project it's incredible how much time they put in. We're proud of all our staff members, and our community contributors, for all the time they have given to seeing Flarum succeed. Thank you!

Plans for 2018

The coming year has some exciting things in store for Flarum as it aims towards a stable release. With a new roadmap, new developers and another beta release under its belt, Flarum's development will continue. The next beta (8 if you're counting) brings some significant changes to Flarum for developers and users alike. Flarum's beta 8 will require PHP 7 due to the inclusion of Laravel 5.5 components (talk to your host now to make sure you will be able to upgrade) and includes a new namespace schema for extensions that will break current versions. To say that again, extensions will need to be updated for beta 8 before they will work. We're aware this might be pretty frustrating for some people, but we're aiming to offer a secure software package. Following active and security support releases of PHP is one of those measures.

A new website for flarum.org is planned, to update a lot of the old information and include the new docs as well. Look for this in 2018, the design is still being finalized but Toby should be releasing the repo to GitHub soon.

As we move closer to stable, we want to stay engaged with the community. We will do this by maintaining our Discord chatrooms, and our Patreon campaign. We will pick up the slack where we left off in 2017, by utilizing Twitter more frequently and publishing more consistent community updates. And we will work on creating better community involvement with contests and other feedback-type engagement to benefit both our users and developers.

Flarum remains committed to the growth of its software and the community surrounding it. We look forward to 2018 as a way to consolidate the progress of the past with the coming future and make Flarum the best forum software around.

Wrap-Up

Flarum is now three years old and has come so far since it began. The last year laid a lot of the groundwork for the future, and most of it was meaningful progress towards the end of the beta period. Our progress towards a stable software version and a healthy community has kept us on track to a promising 2018. We all can't wait to see what this year brings us!

Thanks for reviewing 2017 with us. You can always stay in the know by watching this Blog tag, following us on Twitter @Flarum, chatting with us on Discord, and joining us on Patreon.

just-do-it

jordanjay29 To say that again, extensions will need to be updated for beta 8 before they will work. We're aware this might be pretty frustrating for some people, but we're aiming to offer a secure software package.

Thank you for the update.
Will be released some documentation/guidelines as to how should extensions be built in order to survive the beta 8 update?

just-do-it

jordanjay29 At the same time, Flarum released a much-requested platform for coordinated donations, a Patreon. Patreon was, like Discord, chosen for its popularity and instant familiarity with many of Flarum's userbase, and ability to accept multiple payment types. As a reward, many of our Patrons have access to a special chatroom where they get special insights into Flarum's development, and the ability to give our core devs the financial means to work on Flarum. Click here to become a patron!

Would you guys consider maybe placing ads on Flarum? These ads could be turned off by default and only turned on (via settings menu) by people who really want to support your cause by accepting ads on your website. I'm sure there will be a lot of these people, who can not contribute directly (i.e. patreon) but will gladly accept ads as a way of helping you.

$82/month probably isn't even covering your hosting expenses

Sanguine

@jordanjay29 Thanks for the update, the nice overview and introspection is much appreciated.
Looking forward to all the progress in 2018.

Some questions though, what do you mean specifically with:

committed to the growth of its software and the community
progress towards a healthy community

I hope you and/or other staff could elaborate this year on the long term goals of Flarum. I hope my (personal) goals align but so far I can't tell ;-)

@Arkinn congrats and TIA on leading the documentation initiative! Could you elaborate a bit on your plans for the transition of the old docs to the new docs?

jordanjay29

Sanguine There are different ways we can approach this. Some of them have been discussed in these updates before, like contests and showcasing community contributions through community updates, Contributor badges, and patreon rewards such as a private chatroom and release notes mentions. We want to work with extension developers, and of providers of services like FreeFlarum.com, as we progress towards 0.1 stable to ensure that Flarum develops a robust community where the average user can find confidence in the product as a whole. We want our community to be a strong point of Flarum and a feature of the software, not simply an afterthought.

We always welcome ideas from our users and fans, in addition. Flarum is as much yours as it is ours.

Arkinn

Sanguine congrats and TIA on leading the documentation initiative! Could you elaborate a bit on your plans for the transition of the old docs to the new docs?

My plans at the moment are to firstly update the documentation to be up to date with the standards of the current version, there are a few things that need to be addressed there.

I then will be looking to expand the installation environments, this is something I have been wanting to get done as I notice people here have issues when it comes to installing. The guides I wrote still work great, just need a few tweaks and again, more environments added.

After that, I'm working on a few new pieces that are needed, namely migration, and a few other things

Sanguine

jordanjay29 Thanks! And, perhaps in a more broader sense, when do you consider the Flarum project to be completed?

Ralkage

Welcome to the new year and thank you for the community update!

Some questions and concerns of mine:

I believe Flagrow/Masquerade would be a good candidate for a user bio replacement(It's very flexible and I see adding options for user registration would be handy too!).

What about the infamous welcome/discussion hero going away? What are the plans for redesigning that aspect? Especially the discussion hero?

ReFlar has been slow with developing new extensions due to the busy schedules of our members, but we plan to get on the same page as Flagrow (@luceos) eventually. I have been taking programming bootcamps since November of last year so I will most likely lead the pact when I become comfortable with programming and extension development in general.

luceos

just-do-it Will be released some documentation/guidelines as to how should extensions be built in order to survive the beta 8 update?

Franz

Sanguine

Franz Ha! But I am not asking for a date, but the properties of a finished project.

What does a successful, finished Flarum project look like?

You could say, "it is never finished" but then I expect Toby to object, as software without end-state will inevitably turn into bloatware (nice example). So if it has a finite state, what is it?

luceos

Sanguine looking at the revised roadmap could give some inspiration on what the goal is we're trying to achieve?

Sanguine

luceos Indeed it does, but it makes you guess about the underlying reasoning. Some examples,

Use TypeScript (and all its magic powers) in frontend code

So why is this in the roadmap? Does it mean that when SuperNextGenScript is released, Flarum will adopt it? The roadmap reader cannot tell.

Performance optimizations

What is the goal here? Does Flarum need to be the fastest forum (how fast is that?). Or just "fast enough", whatever it may be? How does performance relate to the "growth of the software" as Jordan writes above? How does it compare to "beautiful software" as stated by Toby?

An official extension marketplace

Why? Does Flarum the OSS-org want to be financially independent by selling exts? Or does it want to optimize the user experience by curating extensions? Different goals produce different design decisions.

In the end, many people have different end states in mind and it will be hard to satisfy all of them. E.g. "the fastest" is probably incompatible with "should run in all environments" and "most features" is incompatible with "the simplest".

For the record, I don't want to sound negative or arrogant Just think that Flarum would benefit from clear goals.

Sanguine

Liberty

I am honoured to be amongst the rest of the staff team and to help do my bit in making Flarum that much better. 2018 is a massive year for me personally so I do hope that we can see the stable release hit the headlines this year too!

Cheers to everyone and their efforts. Keep 'em coming and remember, there is no 'i' in team so let us all work together in making this the best free forum software on the net.

Pollux

I'd like to repeat what Liberty said, each word of it. I feel honoured too to be on bord as a staff member and will do my best to develop Flarum further, as a software platform as well as a community. They both need each other, one can't be thought without the other.

ibrahimk157

Thanks for the awesome update!

Just in case anyone is wondering, my new years resolution is 5K

unknown

Discord is great but I was wandering why you guys haven't tried Slack or is there any reason not to?

luceos

unknown slack is a widely adopted chat system, but it becomes expensive easily (integrations and history for instance). Discord has none of these issues, offers chat, voice, screen sharing out of the box, for free.

To be honest, I have been a nomad when it comes to finding an enterprise-grade chat solution, having tried Slack, HipChat, Mattermost, Skype and many outliers. But only Discord, so far, has proven to be stable, offer all necessary features and demand a low financial footprint.

This is my opinion, the final decision wasn't made by me but it might have been affected by my enthusiasm